Up to 18 Afghans Arrested in Foiled Suicide Attack

The Afghan authorities have arrested 18 people, some Afghan National Army soldiers, in Kabul after thwarting an attempted mass suicide attack, intelligence officials told the BBC.

Up to 11 suicide jackets have been seized inside the Afghan Ministry of Defense, according to the sources, in attacks that would have caused significant loss of life.

The Afghan Ministry of Defense dismissed the report as “rumors,” but BBC’s Bilal Sarwary in Kabul says they just want to play down a major security lapse that is highly embarrassing for the government at a very sensitive time in the war.

The war in Afghanistan has begun to suffer unprecedented opposition and the instability has been exacerbated by successive outrages like the U.S. military’s Koran burning, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales’s massacre of 17 civilians, and leaked video of Marines urinating on Afghan corpses.

But U.S. officials continue, as they have for years, to pretend the failures don’t exist. Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, said this week he see progress amid an extended “rough” patch and cautioned against war fatigue.